We are passionate about apprenticeships at Dogsbody Technology. It is safe to say that without apprenticeships we would not be the company we are today.

This week (6-10 Mar 2017) is National Apprenticeship Week 2017 and it seems only fitting to tell you our story. To use the relevant hashtag, we are literally #madebyapprentices :-)

Apprenticeships are NOT about free/cheap labour.

To date we have hired four apprentices, around one a year since 2013. Jim is still doing his apprenticeship with Alex, Rob & Gary all having completed and moved into full roles in Dogsbody Technology.

Apprenticeships can be a better alternative than university.

Gary was being pushed to go to university but felt it wasn’t a good fit for him. He stumbled across apprenticeships and found us not long after. He can now be heard saying, “Best Google search I ever made”. Gary completed his apprenticeship last year and is starting a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) course this year.

Apprenticeships aren’t the end of education.

Rob completed his apprenticeship last year and is now doing an Open University degree in Computer Sciences. When asked Rob said, “Apprenticeships (and Open University) allow me to work at my own pace on the exact subjects that I want to learn”.

University = debt. Apprenticeships = getting paid.

Jim switched from a University degree to our apprenticeship. Apart from now being a lot happier with the subject Jim is also happier with his bank balance. Jim no longer needs to choose how he spend his money saying, “I can now afford to visit friends and buy the computers I want”. (Dogsbody obviously advocates a sensible saving strategy!)

Offering an apprenticeship allows a small company to grow.

We couldn’t have grown Dogsbody Technology without offering apprenticeships. It really was the perfect match of growing the business and staff simultaneously. I strongly suggest apprentices to any small business looking to grow.

The National Apprenticeship Service is awesome but if you are a small tech company with apprenticeship specific questions, please feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to share our experiences.

Want to join our crack team of Linux commandos? We are always looking for passionate techies to join our small friendly team, Apply NOW.

Each year we make a donation to charities instead of sending Christmas cards.

This year we are very happy to announce donations to the following charities…

Launchpad Reading – A charity that helps some of Reading’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged people to turn their lives around and fulfil their potential. Launchpad began as a soup kitchen in 1979 and were known as Reading Single Homeless Project until 2011. Today, they’re called Launchpad Reading. Based in bright premises in central Reading, they provide accommodation, support and education to people in the town who need help.

Sailors Society – An international Christian charity working in ports across the world. Their chaplains help seafarers and their families from all faiths and none with welfare and practical support. They visit ships in ports and talk with seafarers away from home for up to a year at a time; they help them get in touch with much missed loved ones and access medical treatment; they liaise with frightened families when seafarers are kidnapped by terrorists or imprisoned, mostly through no fault of their own; and they build homes and schools and provide grants to bring hope and security to seafaring communities.

OpenStreetMap – A collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. The creation and growth of OSM has been motivated by restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world, and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices. OSM is considered a prominent example of volunteered geographic information.

During this time any issues will be dealt with on an emergency out of hours basis and we will only be able to support customers who are experiencing a situation where business cannot function without a resolution such as:
– Website / Server down
– Inability to trade online

We will continue monitoring and patching servers as usual over the Christmas period.

We recommend our hosting customers check our status site as usual which will continue to be updated.

If you need to raise an issue please use the standard contact details as calls to our office and support emails will be routed to the engineer on call.

Thank you for your continued support throughout 2016. We hope you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Last weekend (25th & 26th November 2016) Dogsbody Technology headed off to St. John’s church Hoxton in Shoreditch, London to attend (what turned out to be the last) Over the Air 2016.

Over the Air is an annual 2-day mobile developer event with a mix of technical workshops put on by the community, a Hackathon to celebrate programming & making as a creative discipline, and Lightning Talks to entertain and inspire.

This year the Dogsbody Technology team decided to do their first hack and enter the Hackathon Challenges for the first time – and boy did we have fun! It all started with us finding a 4ft Stormtropper while out shopping which we knew we could improve on! We named it ‘Dolly Stormageddon‘, or Stormy for short.

On Friday morning we packed the car full with Raspberrys Pi’s, Arduino’s, Lasers, Lego, wire, speakers, batteries, soldering irons, microphones, USB dongles, cable ties, SD cards, cables, drills, duct tape, sleeping gear and more! Heading off with a general plan of what we wanted to try and achieve.

After the welcome speech and Friday keynote presentation by Hadley Beeman on the effects of Brexit and Trump to the tech industry, we set ourselves up in the Crypt under the church and got to work.

We had a list of stuff we really wanted to do and a list of nice to haves as we knew time was limited to less than 24 hours!

Nexmo was a sponsor of Over the Air and so we decided to use their SMS API to make Dolly read out text messages. Rob set up the Nexmo SMS API and we used an existing Pushover script to communicate this to a Raspbery Pi which then used Amazon Ivona text to speech software (we picked Welsh) to read the text message out over a speaker we put in Dolly’s leg. This was all scripted/set up by Gary. We even added the function that if someone texted ‘shoot’ it made a blaster noise!

For a good demo you always need lights and movement so Dan wired up a laser pointer to his gun and Jim used Lego to mount a servo and programmed an Arduino to get his head to move side to side.

Finally we added an NFC Tag inside his chest with the number for people to text.

Testing included texts such as “I’ve got a brand new combine harvester” and the complete lyrics to Queens “I want to break free” – which is slightly strange spoken by a 4ft Stromtropper in a Welsh accent!

We entered three categories in the Hackathon Challenges – The Nexmo APIs Challenge, The Best Hardware / IoT Entry and The Best Use of Other Features. Below is our Show & Tell! We had exactly 90 seconds to present what we worked on.

OH "we blew that transistor, so we wired the laser pointer to the storm trooper's nipple" #ota16

WE WON!!!

The Best Hardware / IoT Hack!! with an Nexmo Honourable mention

We got a pile of new toys to play with from our win and we couldn’t be happier

Dan, Jim, Claire and Rob attended a few talks but the hack took up most of our time, the always interesting and funny lightening talks included a talk on ’10 stupid stuff I’ve bought on the internet’ (he had to narrow that down from over 40!) which include 1000 plastic ducks and entering an inflatable marathon whilst intoxicated.

Dolly and the Dogsbody Team are now home and the ultimate idea is Dolly will be in our office and alert us when a server goes down..we will rebuild Dolly better, faster, stronger…

Dogsbody Technology would like to say a BIG Thank you to the Organisers and sponsors of Over The Air throughout the years for a great event. We had an amazing time!

It gives you peace of mind
Direct Debit is one of the safest and most reassuring ways of paying your invoicing:

Payments are made automatically, so bills are never forgotten, lost in the post or delayed by postal problems and there’s no risk of late payment charges

Organisations using the Direct Debit scheme have to pass a careful vetting process, and are closely monitored by the banking industry

The Direct Debit Guarantee protects you and your money. It’s offered by all banks and building societies that take part in the scheme.

It saves you timeModern life is hectic – but Direct Debit helps. You’ll find it easier to stay on top of your bills, and you’ll know exactly how much money is going out each month. It also means reduced workload and paperwork for your finance department.

Worried about security – don’t be. GoCardless…

is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2009.

have Military grade encryption – All sensitive details are RSA encrypted, and only communicated over secure channels.

Is a Bacs-approved bureau

backed by the Direct Debit Guarantee

Hold data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998

For other small businesses interested in setting up Direct Debits for their customers, GoCardless was incredible easy to set up and integrate with our account package FreeAgent and we would recommend it for any other small businesses wanting to start making their customers (and their accounts department) life easier. Feel free to use our GoCardless Referral link and we both get a £30 Amazon voucher.

If you would like to find out how you can pay your Dogsbody Technology Invoices painlessly and automatically via Direct Debit please Contact Us

New research out this week shows that the South East is falling behind other parts of the UK in the race to reduce youth unemployment. The study, by consulting firm EY, shows that the South East is now fourth in the league table of regional unemployment, down from second place in 2011.

The disparity in the number of young people in employment is starkest in the region’s key towns and cities, with Southampton, Brighton and Hove and Reading all having youth unemployment rates at higher than the regional average.

But local technology firms are looking to bridge the skills gap that divides young people and prevents them from gaining experience that leads to valuable jobs in the future. Farnborough businesses, Dogsbody Technology and Orcare are both on the hunt for their next apprentice through ApprenticeshipsInFarnborough.com.

Dan Benton, Director of Dogsbody Technology said, “Technology apprenticeships provide a valuable combination of on the job experience and structured learning that enable young people to develop the skills to help drive the growth of small businesses. It’s a real triple win for the apprentice, employer and the learning provider.”

Both Orcare and Dogsbody Technology typically employ school and college leavers with good GCSEs and or A-Levels, but have made a choice to not move onto University.

Advanced Apprenticeships result in qualifications equivalent to A-Levels, and apprentices gain valuable knowledge, skills and experience throughout their apprenticeship, all whilst earning a salary in the region of £150 per week. Alex Meyers, a recent graduate of the Orcare Technology Apprenticeship Programme said, “I was initially attracted by the opportunity to get out into the real world and work on real projects while learning new skills. But now the opportunity to earn a real salary and build up experience has put me in such a strong position in comparison to many people my age.”

Paul Marden, Director of Orcare said “In an environment where graduates are taking on astonishing levels of debt and then struggle to access well paid jobs because of an absence of experience, apprenticeships provide a very viable Plan A for young people looking for a route into a technology career.”

The team behind ApprenticeshipsInFarnborough.com are also looking to work with other local apprentice employers to raise the profile of apprenticeships in the local area.

NOTES TO EDITORSApprenticeships in Farnborough (apprenticeshipsinfarnborough.com) is a collaborative campaign to raise aspirations and reduce youth unemployment in Farnborough, enabling businesses to attract local talent.

Orcare Limited (orcare.com) is a Web Design and Digital Marketing Agency based in Farnborough, Hampshire. It specialises in developing easy to use websites that deliver real business benefit using Microsoft technologies to customers across London and the South East.

Dogsbody Technology Ltd. (dogsbodytechnology.com) is a Linux consultancy company based in Farnborough, Hampshire building and maintaining secure, reliable & scalable servers ensuring customers get the best out of technology.

Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.

A temporary town of more than a thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting.

To help matters along, we provide fast internet, power to the tent, good beer, and amazing installations, entirely organised by a dedicated team of volunteers.

Tickets were on sale in advance and are now sold out but come back here to see our review of the event next week.

The day is to give thanks to the hardworking skilled men and women who you rarely see but keep your business servers secure, up and working day and night 24/7 365 days a year. These are the people who at 3am when your server has a blip jumps straight on it to check it is OK (much like having a small child only easier!)

If you don’t know who your SysAdmins are then as the great Futurama said…

If you are interested in joining our crack SysAdmin team then We Are Hiring!

Here at Dogsbody Technology we monitor servers and services for hundreds of clients, you may have read our previous blog post talking about our Warboard and how we make use of it. This blog post covers the other tools we use for responding to incidents and issues real time, our Dogsbody Technology Webhooks.

The main thing we use the webhooks for are Pingdom, Newrelic & Sirportly alerts. When an incident is triggered in Pingdom or Newrelic they will make an API call to our webhook with the relevant information we require to investigate an incident, the webhook will then determine the priority of the incident and send an alert to our Pushover user accounts so we are alerted and can respond to the incident.

High priority alerts, such as site outages also trigger a rotating blue police style light which is accompanied by a siren sound from the office speaker.

The Dogsbody Technology office siren

We also use the webhooks to notify a user when certain interactions happen in our ticketing system Sirportly, such as being assigned a new ticket or when one of their existing tickets is replied to.

To ensure our webhooks would have near to 100% uptime and we wouldn’t miss an alert, we decided the best place to host them would be using AWS Lambda & AWS API Gateway. These two services combined allow us to run the webhooks with Amazon’s high availability infrastructure while only paying small amounts on a per request/alert basis, which is the perfect type of model for this service.

To put into perspective how cost effective AWS’ pricing model for our alerts is, last month (June 2016) we received 25,282 alerts for all of our endpoints combined. This worked out at a total monthly cost of … $0.10! AWS actually provide you with a free amount of lambda execution time per month which we haven’t even reached yet, we’re only getting charged that 10 cents for the API Gateway.

Let us know if you find any of the services and technologies mentioned above interesting and we can write some more in-depth blog posts on those subjects, and even some guides on using them. The alerts talked about in this blog post come with the majority of our server monitoring packages, so be sure to get in contact if you need any of our services.